A Dowry of Blood (A Dowry of Blood, #1)

by S.T. Gibson

ven loneliness, hollow and cold, becomes so familiar it starts to feel like a friend.

This is my last love letter to you, though some would call it a confession. I suppose both are a sort of gentle violence, putting down in ink what scorches the air when spoken aloud.

If you can still hear me wherever you are, my love, my tormentor, hear this: It was never my intention to murder you. Not in the beginning, anyway.

It was as though fate had laid me out for you, an irresistible banquet.

If this was to be my only wretched salvation, so be it.

You did not let me keep my name, so I will strip you of yours. In this world, you are what I say you are, and I say you are a ghost, a long night’s fever dream that I have finally woken up from. I say you are the smoke-wisp memory of a flame, thawing ice suffering under an early spring sun, a chalk ledger of debts being wiped clean.

I say you do not have a name.

I have never felt more truly alive in my waking death than when I am taking the life of another person.

What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with wanting?

think, my lord, that this is when you loved me best. When I was freshly made, and still as malleable as wet clay in your hands.

I lost myself so entirely in charting the contours of my love for you that there wasn’t any room for tracking time.

In my mind, I was God’s lovely angel of judgment, come to unsheathe the sword of divine wrath against those who truly deserved it.

The people only call me cruel because it is easier to think of a woman as cruel than competent.

How can I blame you for wanting her, my lord, when I wanted her so badly myself?

Lying with her made me feel so vibrantly alive. It was almost enough to make me forget that I was already dead.

I was no woman; I was merely a supplicant, a pilgrim who had stumbled across your dark altar and was doomed to worship at it for ever.

“It would be easier if he hated us,” she said. “But he loves us all terribly. And if we go on letting him love us, that love is going to kill us. That’s what makes him so dangerous.”

I made you into my private Christ, supplicated with my own dark devotions. Nothing existed beyond the range of your exacting gaze, not even me.

I was simply a non-entity when you weren’t looking at me, an empty vessel waiting to be filled by the sweet water of your attention.

My sisters, my most intimate friends. My girls, mine.

We three were made to fit together, and I am not entirely myself unless I am nestled between the two of them.

I wanted to worship at the cathedral of her body until she cried out like ringing Sunday mass bells.

Even if you were sunlight itself, I would still scorch myself to be close to you.”

We worshipped each other until dawn, losing ourselves in our love for each other. When dawn came, I slumbered in both their arms, secure in the knowledge that I would never have to be alone again.